A room with a view: take a look at this breathtaking aurora from the ISS

There are some breathtaking views, such as hotels with which you can see the Skyline of New York City and the resorts with a wonderful view of the mountain or sea. But there are only a few places with a view that is as absurdly cool as the international space station. On Wednesday, Astronaut Don Pettit, who is also a well-known photographer and inventor of the Zero-G coffee cup, took a wonderful time-lapse video of the ISS when he flew over an Aurora.

The video that is visible on X is about 50 seconds. It shows the ISS that creeps around the earth. It is a cool shot alone, but the Aurora appears from the left around the 27-second mark. A few seconds later, the spectators are greeted with a sluggish, flowing fog that covers part of the earth.

Then the earth is in a green glow that looks like something from a film or a video game. As quickly as the Aurora appears, it lets the view of the camera and the POV is stretched out into space again.

Despite its foggy appearance, the Aurora Borealis is anything but. The bright effect is caused by an interaction between the sun winds of the sun and the magnetic field of the earth. These interactions occur most often when the sun releases coronal masses that massively throw out the plasma into the earth’s magnetic field.

With the sun in its solar maximum and in the middle of Aurora season, it can only be a matter of time until these green lights extend far to the USA, as we saw last year.

Backwards through the room

Pettit was able to receive the time -lapse video because the ISS is currently flying backwards. This usually doesn’t do this, but the space station awaited society. On Tuesday, the Sojuz MS-27 SpaceCraft started with the NASA astronaut Jonny Kim and the Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky, whereby the final goal is the ISS. The docking maneuver was relieved by freaking out the entire space station 180 degrees, which was successfully completed 3 hours after the start.

In addition to turning 180 degrees, the ISS also deliberately lowers its height of how pettit was indicated in his tweet when he said: “Changes in height, changes in the latitude”. This is not a maneuver that the ISS often executes, but it is done practically every time a soyz spaceship starts in the ISS. With the slight waste in height (normally by one kilometer) and the reorientation, the Sojuz can dock like another spaceship just a few hours after the start.